link1. Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to 6 million a year.
-One key reason why we struggle to see progress in the world today is that we do not know how very bad the past was. Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful. To bring this to mind I need to know both statistics: When someone says we can sit back and relax because the world is in a much better place, I point out that 11 children are still dying every minute. We cannot accept the world as it is today. And when I feel hopeless in the face of this tragedy, I remember that we reduced annual child deaths from 20 million to 5.6 million in the last fifty years.
2. Since 1960, the fertility rate has fallen by half.
-Improvements in conditions for women and the health of children have driven a rapid reduction in fertility rates across the world. In fact, the global fertility rate has halved in the last 50 years, from more than 5 children per woman to fewer than 2.5 children. The world population growth rate has also halved in the last 50 years and is just above 1 percent.
3. 137,000 people escaped extreme poverty every day between 1990 and 2015.
-In 1990, 1.86 billion people were living on less than 1.90 international-$ per day—more than every third person in the world. Twenty-five years later, the number of people living in extreme poverty has more than halved to 706 million, every tenth person.
